Monday, July 22, 2013

Review finds the Medieval Warm Period was global & generally warmer than the present

A new paper from SPPI & CO2 Science reviews evidence of the Medieval Warm Period in the southern portion of North America, and finds "the studies herein reviewed clearly demonstrate the existence of a Medieval Warm Period far removed from the stomping grounds of the Nordic Vikings, while simultaneously helping to debunk the climate-alarmist claim that the MWP was a minor non-global phenomenon. Quite to the contrary, the MWP was truly global in extent, as demonstrated by data obtained on all of earth's continents; and it was characterized by temperatures that were generally higher than those of the recent past and present. And it did so in an atmosphere with a CO2 concentration on the order of only 285 ppm, as compared to the 400 ppm of today."

Climate alarmists claim that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to the burning of fossil fuels - such as coal, gas and oil - have raised global air temperatures to their highest level in the past one to two millennia. And, therefore, investigating the possibility of the existence of a period of equal or greater global warmth within the past one to two thousand years has become a high-priority enterprise; for if such a period could be shown to have existed at times when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was far less than it is today, there would be no compelling reason to attribute the warmth of our day to the CO2 released to the air by mankind's burning of the fossil fuels that supplied the power that sustained the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, in this review of the pertinent scientific literature, results of the search for such knowledge are presented for studies conducted within North American countries located south of the southern border of the United States.Focusing on the North American countries located south of the United States southern border, the studies herein reviewed clearly demonstrate the existence of a Medieval Warm Period far removed from the stomping grounds of the Nordic Vikings, while simultaneously helping to debunk the climate-alarmist claim that the MWP was a minor non-global phenomenon. Quite to the contrary, the MWP was truly global in extent, as demonstrated by data obtained on all of earth's continents; and it was characterized by temperatures that were generally higher than those of the recent past and present. And it did so in an atmosphere with a CO2 concentration on the order of only 285 ppm, as compared to the 400 ppm of today.